You’ll recognize Masha right away. True, she’s wearing standard-issue ballet gear like everybody else. But her tutu is black. And it’s not long — shortly after the audience is encouraged to help sing a curtain-raising rendition of the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” — before she clinches the identification with her immortal signature line: “I’m in mourning for my life.”

Otherwise, it may take you a while to figure out which unhappy Chekhov character is which in “The Seagull and Other Birds,” wherein the experimental Irish troupe Pan Pan turns one of modern drama’s great seminal works upside down, inside out and every which way but loose.

For one thing, the thwarted souls of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” are never quite themselves in this giddy act of theatrical implosion, which opened this weekend at the Abrons Arts Center. They may often speak the familiar dialogue of those well-known anguished Russians Arkadina, Konstantin, Nina, Sorin and Trigorin (as well as mopey Masha), albeit with a fresh peppering of Anglo-Saxon obscenities.

But the six cast members portraying these oft-incarnated characters usually address one another by the names of the performers playing them. (Since the actress playing Nina is named Judith Roddy, Nina is always referred to as Judith.) And sometimes, without warning, they’ll transform themselves into a whole other set of fictional folk, without regard to appropriateness of age or gender.

These include the randy men and women of Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” the vicious midnight revelers of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and the toe-dancing avian flock from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” Other incarnations are harder to identity, since they come from plays written by the performers and bear no immediate resemblance to anything else that is said or done onstage.

As you may have gathered, all boundaries are porous in the world according to Pan Pan, which was founded in the early 1990s by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn. That includes the lines that separate actors from audience, high culture from low, male from female and serious from silly. We are living, it seems, in a dematerializing world, where nobody can ever be sure of time, place or attitude.

The troupe’s previous mash-ups of literary classics include “Oedipus Loves You,” “Everyone Is King Lear in His Own Home” and “Mac-Beth 7,” as well as the memorably creepy “The Crumb Trail” (a riff on the Hansel and Gretel story). These productions have often involved elaborately mixed media, in which sounds and images are technologically refracted and displaced.

Its “Seagull,” directed by Mr. Quinn and designed by Ms. Cosgrove, is relatively low-tech. The basic mise-en-scène involves little more than six human bodies (to be augmented by audience members), some white sheets, recorded music (from Bach to the Rolling Stones) and tights and tutus.

As such, this production is probably the company’s most straightforward ode to theater’s limits and infinite potential, its frustrations and consolations, and the impossibility of ever shaking off the past or ignoring the present in art. Well, straightforward is perhaps not the right adjective for a show that keeps mutating like an amoeba.

As in Chekov’s original “Seagull,” we begin with Konstantin (Dick Walsh), the young playwright, lamenting the staleness of conventional theater and the need for revolution, which he believes his avant-garde work embodies. In what follows, the ensemble — rounded out by Andrew Bennett, Gina Moxley and Daniel Reardon — shifts into other, later modes of cultural rebellion and transfiguration.

So we have, for example, the love triangle of Konstantin, Nina and Trigorin communicating in gangsta rap. At other times, they return to what is basically Chekhov’s text, with a weariness that is — to be honest — infectious.

Those stretches of tedium are intentional, I presume, suggesting how in our search for the new in art we keep returning to the old. (Don’t forget that this anarchic cast is dressed up as a walking cliché of a ballet troupe.) Of course, this sense of defeated ennui is exactly what plagues Chekhov’s Russians of some hundred years ago, too.

But this show also conveys the unquenchable energy that courses through the very attempt to make art, a vigor that bubbles to the surface at unexpected moments and in exhilarating ways. The manners with which the cast co-opts audience members into the proceedings should be embarrassing but instead feels jubilantly collegial.

We’re all in this together, it appears, fellow swimmers (and sinkers) in this crazy mixed-up cultural stew of the early 21st century. And no matter how resistant you are to Pan Pan’s often baffling theater of anarchy, I’ll wager that you’ll find moments throughout that have you grinning, with the irrational delight of a child over an especially idiotic nonsense joke. Making art may be hard, but even when we fail, it can be ridiculous fun.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: One of Modern Drama’s Seminal Works Is Turned Upside Down. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe